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Nightmare! Imagine all your new business enquiries from one crucial source, for example, the phone, suddenly stopped. No warning; no explanation. One day a source of enquiries you’d relied on for years was fine, the next day, everything dried up.
And suppose this only affected your company. Your competitors were still picking up their own new enquiries – along with the ones you used to get! You’d feel unfairly treated, angry and very frustrated.
But that’s how thousands of companies now feel about everyone’s favourite search engine, Google.
Ever since mid November, Google has radically changed the criteria, or algorithms, it applies to the ranking of websites, resulting in tens of thousands of sites losing what had been high rankings on the search engine results pages suddenly plunging into oblivion.
The fallout has been calamitous for many. It’s not unusual for Google toaccount for 65% plus of any company’s overall searches, and that kind of loss of enquiries overnight has hurt.
Google puts their action down to a desperate requirement to clear out irrelevant sites and more interestingly, wrongly optimised sites that use dubious methods such as invisible links and cloaking, for instance, to artificially boost a site’s ranking.
Conspiracy theories abound about Google’s motives, but the stark fact is thatin spite of their dominance, Google need to strive for absolute purety of all searches if they are to hold on to their market share, especially with rumours abounding with an imminent deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft.
Google’s so called ‘Florida Dance’ brings out a lot of home truths about search engine marketing. Not only in how central it has become to more and more forward thinking companies, but also in the increasing importance of hiring an ethical and reputable SEO firm.
If Google is out to penalise sites which they consider to be bending the rules or cheating the system, how safe is your site? Indeed, how many client companies would even have an inkling of any process implemented by an external SEO company might affect their rankings so dramatically?
It should also ring alarm bells in companies who may have been talked out of hiring a reputable SEO company, perhaps by their web design agency or ISP who may be stuck in the old days of site optimisation, where as in fact, thediscipline is now a recognised and mainstream marketing activity. Effective search engine optimisation should not be viewed as a threat to a company’s existing suppliers – it should add value and more importantly push up the sales curve by presenting motivated and targeted visitors to a particular site.
Never before has the case for outsourcing such an invaluable part of a company’s marketing mix been so effectively put!
Existing Vertical Leap clients can take comfort that none of their sites have been affected by the ‘Florida Dance’.
Vertical Leap adheres strictly to the ethical rules of search engine optimisation and steers clear of any shady optimisation methods.
Vertical Leap’s Managed Search Engine Optimisation campaign is a carefully planned marketing process that is tailor made for each site. The service has been carefully built to let busy managers get on with running their businesses whilst their websites are effectively optimised and monitored by Vertical Leap. Every client gets the services of a proactive Campaign Manager whooversees every element of this long term process and who will make recommendations and act on them with your approval.
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